A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Mustang walked in and took a bar stool. Lois greeted her cheerfully.

  “Look, Mustang, a Canadian quarter. It has a moose on the back.”

  “My mother is from Winnipeg,” Mustang said. She looked at the coin. She had always thought that moose had bigger antlers. “She says it’s really cold there in the winter, and that’s why she married an American.”

  Lois began to make Mustang a drink, a Screwdriver, easy on the vodka, easy on the ice. Mustang liked it that way, and she was good for business. “That’s interesting,” Lois said. “It’s good to hear you talk. You might want to try talking more. Folks are just naturally curious, and it makes them feel good to learn new things. I think you’d be surprised at how much people are concerned with one another.”

  Due to a head cold, Jessica didn’t come that night. Candace and Scarlett and Mustang rehashed their trip to the space center. “I understand now why we can see vapor trails from shuttle blast-offs all the way here,” Mustang said. “The rockets are enormous.”

  “It takes a lot to go fast enough to get all the way to space,” Scarlett said.

  “Escape velocity,” Mustang said.

  “You were paying attention on the tour,” Candace teased. “You do want to be an astronaut.”

  “Astronauts are all scientists these days, so I’ll have to become a scientist first,” Mustang said. It was possible. The universe was a big place. When Mustang looked at the stars on the way to her car, she knew that she was looking back into the beginning of time.

  Inside, Lois asked Scarlett and Candace how the trip went.

  “She liked it,” Candace said. “She stopped being crabby the minute we got there. She hasn’t gotten crabby since.”

  “She had this funny look on her face, like everything was beautiful,” Scarlett said. “Maybe she felt closer to home.”

  “Come on, she’s not really an alien,” Candace said. “She’s just a loser who needed a clue.”

  “If she is an alien,” Scarlett said, “she probably doesn’t know it. Even if she isn’t, we can be nice to her. I don’t think she’s had people be nice to her.”

  Lois nodded. Scarlett understood people.

  Candace pouted. “So we’re going to keep playing games with her. I don’t think that’s fun anymore.”

  Mustang arrived at Moody’s two weeks later with an announcement. “Not all the paperwork is done, and the loans and scholarships aren’t nailed down, but it’s pretty sure I’m heading to the University of Chicago in January. I’m going to study astronomy.”

  Everyone hugged her. Greg and Lois exchanged knowing looks. Scarlett worried out loud about the cold weather in Illinois. Jessica pulled out the photo of Mustang with the NASA greeter in the space suit. Mustang studied it with surprise. She actually looked good in a snapshot for once, unless it was the candlelight.

  Candace grabbed the photo. “Here’s the astronaut,” she said, pointing to the spaceman, “and here’s the alien he just met,” she said with a smile, pointing to Mustang.

  Jessica looked at Candace, furious. She had just ruined everything. “What she meant,” Jessica said, turning to Mustang, “is that to the spaceman, humans are aliens. Assuming that the spaceman isn’t from Earth.”

  Scarlett tried to help. “It would be so much fun to actually meet an alien.”

  In a honeyed voice, Candace asked Mustang, “Wouldn’t you like to meet an alien?”

  Mustang considered this. Her friends wanted to talk about aliens, and Mustang had things to say. “I would like to meet aliens. Scientist are looking for them, you know.”

  “Out in space?” Scarlett said.

  “With radio telescopes,” Mustang said. “Messages will probably get here before spaceships do. There are some projects looking for messages transmitted from other planets, and we’ve sent some messages ourselves.” She noticed everyone staring at her. Lois was right—people were curious. She kept talking.

  “I think there really are people on other planets. I don’t know what makes me so sure, but I am positive they’re out there, and I want to find them. That’s what I’m going to study at college.”

  “So,” Greg said, “you don’t think any have actually arrived on Earth yet?”

  “If they were here,” Mustang said, “how could we tell?” Everyone laughed. Mustang didn’t get her own punch line, but to be a good sport, she joined in the laughter.

  After she had left, everyone relaxed. “She never did catch on,” Candace said.

  Jessica glared at her. “I could have killed you.”

  “She’s not really an alien,” Candace said.

  “Either way, we did a good thing,” Scarlett said. “I want a career, too.”

  “She is definitely an alien,” Greg said. “I think there’s aliens all around, and she’s going to do great things in astronomy. I just wonder if she’ll ever find out.”

  “Sooner or later,” Lois said, “a body knows home.”

  Lois hosted a going-away party for Mustang. Jessica brought her a helium balloon shaped like a star and a copy of the spaceman photo. Scarlett gave her a T-shirt imprinted with a galloping horse. Candace, smiling broader than everyone, gave her an orange-scented candle. Greg presented a bottle of NoDoz. Mustang got a little maudlin as she said goodbye. Her wet eyes reflected the room full of candles. “I promise I’ll come back and visit every time I’m in Lake Avernus.”

  Lois eventually hired Scarlett to help manage the bar and taught Scarlett every aspect of running a business. Elvis remained banned from the jukebox. When the retro fad passed, Lois and Scarlett redecorated with a horse theme. Free oranges became a trademark of the bar, and business stayed busy. Scarlett kept a wondering eye on customers. Some of them loved oranges a lot.

  At school, Mustang applied herself to radio spectroscopy. She returned to Moody’s from time to time as her studies stretched from undergraduate classes to graduate work. Lois and Scarlett agreed that contact with space did her a world of good. Each time she visited, Mustang seemed more content.

  On a hot summer night, Mustang hurried in carrying a sheaf of papers, eager to share the contents with Lois and Scarlett. She pointed to computer-printed charts and graphs.

  “This is a mathematical language. All it says is hello—but hello from light-years away,” she said breathlessly. “I was the one to recognize it, and they just confirmed it at MIT. Watch the news on Monday. I’ll be back in Chicago, and I’ll probably be on TV. This is just so great. I found them. I really found them.”

  “How could you tell it was from them?” Scarlett asked.

  Mustang shrugged. “I don’t know, and everyone keeps asking me that.”

  “I expect it just looked familiar,” Lois said. “We’re going to have a lot to tell each other.”

  THE ONLY KNOWN JUMP ACROSS TIME

  Eugene Mirabelli

  1

  THE ONLY KNOWN JUMP across time produced by an apparatus, a so-called time machine, took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May of 1928. The people who performed the brief transit were Lydia Webster Chase and Enzo Augusto Capellino.

  2

  Enzo Capellino was a tailor and Lydia Chase was the daughter of Prescott Chase, a retired professor of botany at Harvard University. Enzo and Lydia knew of each other only because her father had his shirts and suits made in Capellino’s shop. One day in 1908, while being fitted for a summer-weight linen suit jacket, Professor Chase happened to make small talk about gardening. Now, young Enzo Capellino was an avid gardener and he invited the professor to walk through the sunny patch he cultivated behind his shop. Old Professor Chase was delighted by this tangled paradise of Sicilian fruit trees, grapevines, and vegetables, and in return he invited Mr. Capellino to visit his garden, a halfacre of flower beds, cool moss and ferns and fish pools, gravel walks and willow trees which lay behind his large square house on Kirkland Street.

  In the years that followed, the elderly professor and the young tailor visited each other’s gardens once every Jun
e, exchanging seeds and cuttings. A certain decorum clothed these visits, partly because Professor Chase had been taught to treat social inferiors with polite formality and partly because Mr. Capellino had been taught to show deference to his elders, and the professor was clearly a generation older.

  3

  In May of 1927 the professor’s daughter, Lydia Chase, visited the tailor’s shop for the first time, bringing with her the measurements for her father’s summer shirts. Enzo looked up from his cutting table that day and saw a tall, slender woman dressed in white, a beautiful woman with a distracted look about her. She moved with an elegant awkwardness, as if—as if—as if, he thought, she were a large-winged crane or snowy egret, a creature who would be superbly graceful the moment she took flight, for air would be her natural element, not earth. Enzo himself was so distracted by her that it was not until after she left that he looked at the measurements she had given him. He saw that they were much shrunken from a year ago.

  Miss Chase returned to Mr. Capellino’s shop a few weeks later to pick up the shirts. Enzo understood from the terribly diminished measurements that the professor, her father, was very sick. He wanted to solace Miss Chase, who was clearly even more distracted than before, but found that all he could say was, “I hope Professor Chase is well.” To which Lydia replied, “Thank you.” She flushed slightly, hesitated as if to say something more, then turned and left the shop, bumping ever so slightly into the door on her way out.

  4

  Prescott Chase, Harvard Professor Emeritus of botany, veteran of the Civil War, died in December of 1927 at the age of eighty-four, and was buried next to his wife and son in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Prescott’s old friends had already died or were ailing and housebound, and Christ Church, though small, looked quite empty. Lydia’s women friends attended the service, as did five of the professor’s former students and the President of the Charles Downing Horticulture Society. After the service, as Lydia followed the coffin past the empty pews, she noticed a solitary man standing halfway to the back of the church. He was of medium height, or somewhat shorter, and he was gazing at her with enormously sad, sympathetic eyes. It was not until she was home and had closed the door behind her that Lydia remembered him as the tailor, Mr. Capellino, upon which she suddenly burst into tears.

  5

  Lydia’s friends visited her regularly that December, but by the last week of January, 1928, the only visitor she had was a librarian from Harvard who had asked to examine her father’s books and papers to see if there was anything valuable she could donate to the university. She was lonely.

  6

  The figure of Mr. Capellino refused to abandon Lydia’s memory, so in February she visited his shop. He was even shorter and darker than she had recalled, and the shop more cluttered. But when he stepped forward to greet her he smiled, his face lighting up so much at the sight of her that she forgot what she had planned to say and fumbled with pleasantries about the weather. As for the weather, sleet and freezing rain had kept everyone else at home, so the shop was empty. Lydia recovered herself and said she hoped Mr. Capellino could help her choose a necktie as a gift. Enzo explained that he had no neckties.

  “No neckties?” she echoed, glancing about with a worried look.

  “Please make yourself comfortable, Miss Chase,” he said. “I’ll make tea.”

  Lydia sat in a chair beside the cutting table and removed her gloves. Enzo brought out a ceramic tea service whose brightly painted teapot was in the shape of a hen.

  “My mother died many years ago and my father needed somebody, needed me, to take care of the house, take care of him and the house,” Lydia blurted out, as if she had been asked.

  “I understand,” Enzo replied gently, pouring tea. “I was eighteen when my father died. I had to take over the shop to help my mother and to make dowries for my two younger sisters. My sisters married seventeen years ago, and my mother died three years ago, and here I am today.”

  Lydia nervously twisted her gloves in her lap and wondered what to say next. “You garden on summer evenings,” she ventured.

  “And I read on winter nights,” Enzo said.

  After a moment she asked, “Have you ever wished to escape time, Mr. Capellino, so as to change your life?”

  “Often,” he said, looking up at her.

  “Would you change things in the past or the future?”

  “You cannot change the past, only the future,” he said.

  “Somebody should build a time machine to go to the future,” Lydia said, smiling for the first time.

  Enzo was enchanted by her smile. “I will do that,” he told her.

  7

  One afternoon Enzo looked up from his jumbled cutting table and there was Lydia, standing tall in the middle of the shop. Snowflakes melting on her black cloche hat and on her long black coat gave her the appearance of—the appearance of—Yes! Enzo thought, the appearance of the night sky clothed with stars. She asked Mr. Capellino for help in choosing a pair of gentleman’s leather gloves. He explained that he didn’t carry gloves. “No gloves?” Lydia said, looking about vaguely.

  “No one will be coming here in this blizzard,” Enzo said, quickly bringing out a painted coffee pot shaped like a rooster. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

  He was pouring coffee from the brightly colored pot when Lydia asked him, “Have you thought about the time machine?”

  “I’ve thought about it for years.”

  “How would it work?” she asked.

  “Einstein has written about the fabric of space-time,” he began.

  “Einstein? The fabric of space-time?”

  Enzo set down the pot. “Those are his words, yes. And I wondered about this fabric. He said it was curved, and I know something about fitting pieces of flat fabric over a curved surface. And as I thought about it, evening after evening, I came to see that the past is like a tightly woven bolt of cloth, endlessly wide and endlessly long and endlessly deep.”

  “And the future?”

  “The future is being woven in this passing instant, right now. When we say now we refer to the edge where the threads are being brought together. A time machine will permit us to get just ahead, just a wee bit ahead, just a thread’s breadth ahead of now. And once there, we can weave life any which way we want, to please ourselves.” He had never felt so confident and he broke into a smile.

  Lydia had discovered she deeply enjoyed talking this kind of nonsense with Mr. Capellino. “And what would it take to leap the distance of one thread ahead of now?” she asked with a smile.

  “A lightning bolt,” he said, laughing for the delight he saw in her face.

  Lydia stayed talking with Enzo rather longer than the last visit and enjoyed herself more than she had in a long time.

  8

  The next time Lydia and Enzo met, a gust of wind blew Lydia’s umbrella inside out just as she came in the door. She was gasping for breath and her face was drenched with rain. Enzo produced a dazzling white handkerchief and dabbed gently at her cheeks, but after three dabs the couple became embarrassed at how close they were to each other. Abruptly Enzo busied himself in fixing her umbrella while Lydia composed herself. She asked did he have any books, and Enzo laughed and answered no, no books, only men’s clothing.

  “The man who came from Harvard is cataloging my father’s library and putting all the books in order,” she said, looking around as if seeing the shop for the first time. “He’s very good at making things neat and orderly. Perhaps you could use—”

  But Enzo interrupted to tell her, “They are like diamonds in your hair, those raindrops.” That was the first time he had ever said anything like that, and he was as surprised as Lydia by his boldness. He went off and returned with a tray and two glasses. “A little sweet wine from before Prohibition,” he explained.

  Lydia sipped from her glass, coughed and put her hand to her chest as the wine went down. “How would one get a lightning bolt?” she asked.

  “I’ll
make one.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Yes, certainly. Before my parents immigrated to this country they lived in Palermo and saw Augusto Righi demonstrate his lightning machine at the University. My father was very impressed by Righi. He saw the demonstration twice and told me about it many times. My middle name, Augusto, is after Augusto Righi.”

  “The machine made lightning bolts?” Lydia asked, beginning to smile.

  “Little lightning bolts, yes. Or, as you might say, very large sparks.” Enzo, too, began to smile.

  “How would one make a time machine?”

  “It’s the same as with making a suit. First I make the pattern, then I make the finished suit—or in this case, the machine.”

  “But how does it work? I mean, how does lightning make the time machine possible?”

  “The lightning bolt makes a tiny rip in the fabric of space-time, in the precise present, in the now. And if you are right there when it happens, as close as you can get, you will suddenly find yourself on the frayed edge of the fabric of space-time. It stands to reason.”

  Lydia felt unreasonably happy. “When the time is right, I would like very much to see your machine.”

  “I’ll invite you.”

  Lydia stayed and talked with Enzo until he closed the shop, and then she walked home, reflecting on all the turns their conversation had taken.

  9

  Augusto Righi (1850-1921) is probably best known for his study of electromagnetic oscillations. His principal teaching post was at the University of Bologna, but he also taught at the University of Palermo in the years 1880-1885. The machine which Enzo Capellino’s father saw Righi demonstrate was most likely the one designed by Righi to accumulate weak electric charges. Essentially, the apparatus consisted of a rubber belt looped between two metal pulleys set one above the other, and at the upper end of the loop the belt traveled through a small opening into a hollow copper sphere, leaving its electric charge there. In theory, there is no limit to the voltage which can be accumulated on the sphere. Probably the earliest precursor of Righi’s apparatus was a device built by Walckiers de St. Amand in France in 1784. His machine was simply a silken belt stretched between two rollers, so that when you turned the rollers the silk moved, rubbing against small cushions positioned at the rollers, thereby accumulating an electric charge.